‘We have a big job to do,’ Gary Mar says of need to engage PC party

CALGARY — Tory leadership candidate Gary Mar says whoever wins the run-off vote in two weeks to become Alberta’s next premier will then face the more daunting task of reconnecting with thousands of party members who have simply tuned out.

“We have a big job to do,” said Mar after he won 41 per cent of the support in the first round of balloting Saturday to replace Premier Ed Stelmach as leader of the governing Progressive Conservatives.

“We’ve become disengaged with the very members whose support we rely upon to get elected,” he said. “Whether you talk about health care or municipalities or the royalty review, the underlying theme is the government was doing too much telling and not enough listening.”

Mar, Alison Redford and Doug Horner finished one-two-three respectively in the first round of voting. The bottom three candidates — Ted Morton, Rick Orman and Doug Griffiths — trailed the field and now drop off the ballot.

The top three are to run again in a final round of balloting on Oct. 1, with the results announced in Edmonton.

Polls had suggested Mar, a 49-year-old cabinet minister in the Ralph Klein era, was the favourite. He did not disappoint.

Mar collected 24,195 votes, good for 41 per cent. Redford, the 46-year-old former justice minister under Stelmach who quit her post to run, was second with 11,129 votes, (19 per cent).

Horner, a 50-year-old Edmonton-area legislature member who stepped down as deputy premier to run, took in 8,635 votes (14.5 per cent).

But the 59,361 who cast ballots were less than two-thirds of those who marked ballots in the November 2006 campaign that lifted Stelmach to the top job.

Tory Party president Bill Smith has said the key figure is the date — the 2006 figure came in winter. In contrast, this year’s race comes at harvest time and many of the Tory supporters are busy in the fields, he noted.

Griffiths, a 38-year-old backbencher, visited many of those communities, and said the tractor was only one factor pulling voters away.

He said he also encountered weariness and cynicism.

“People would say (to me) ‘I think you’re the best candidate, but I don’t think you can change things from the inside,”’ he said.

The poor showing is disconcerting to a party that has governed for 40 years but slid back in popularity under Stelmach, particularly in Calgary, and now faces a threat on its right flank from the upstart Wildrose Party.

The Wildrose has four members in the legislature — three of whom are disaffected floor-crossing ex-Tories — and has become the de facto home for fiscal and social conservatives who feel the PCs have lost their way in the recent deficit-budget years of Stelmach.

Orman said Saturday’s result was a quasi-victory for the Wildrose. With three progressive candidates left to choose from, said Orman, PC voters who support bedrock conservative ideals like fiscal restraint and small government are left with a clear alternative in the Wildrose.

“The conservative side of the party has fallen off the precipice,” said Orman, who was a cabinet minister under former premier Don Getty two decades ago.

“The three remaining candidates are centre-left. Either that’s where the party wants to go or the centre-right members of our party have gone somewhere else or are sitting on their hands.”

Horner disputed that as simplistic label-gun politics.

“I’m a Progressive Conservative,” said Horner. “I view my ideology through the values and principles of the party. What does that mean? It’s compassion, integrity, innovation and commitment to excellence.”

As the final three begin to beat the bushes anew to sell more memberships, the big question is who will the three candidates back, said political scientist Doreen Barrie.

If they urge their supporters to go Mar, she said, the party may appear unified under the one candidate who won ridings across the province and in Calgary and Edmonton on Saturday.

But if they urge their troops to move to Horner or Redford, she said, the party may be in for the same second-round jockeying as in 2006, when Stelmach came up the middle between favourites Morton and Jim Dinning to win.

The big difference this time, said Barrie, is that Dinning had weak 30 per cent support after the first ballot while Mar got more votes than his two rivals combined.

“He’s got a commanding lead,” she said.

Mar said they’ll be reaching out to the failed candidates.

“We think there are some people we share some things in common with, and we’ll be talking about trying to get support of candidates who aren’t going on to the second ballot,” he said.

Redford’s success was a surprise, given she has just one fellow caucus member, Art Johnston, publicly supporting her. Horner and Mar, by comparison, have scores of caucus supporters rounding up votes for them.

Redford said her success has come from reaching out to community leaders and volunteers who in turn got the word out by word of mouth and social media like Twitter.

“That’s what’s made the difference,” she said, adding she’ll be travelling to as many communities as possible in the next 14 days to find even more converts.

Horner’s strength came from the north-central rural ridings Saturday, and he said the plan is to mine the untapped support they know is out there.

“We’ve got to do some work in Calgary. We’ve got to get our vote out,” he said.